How To Create a Strong Social Media Advocacy Program

How To Create a Strong Social Media Advocacy Program

There’s nothing increasingly inveigling than a friend’s endorsement — expressly on social media. That’s why a social media sponsorship program is the weightier way to show the benefits of your products instead of telling your customers why they should care.

Brand advocates help you connect with potential customers and cut through the noise online. They can uplift your visibility by:

  • Showing off your products on social media
  • Leaving positive reviews on your website
  • Driving increasingly traffic to your products

In short, an engaged polity leads to largest sales outcomes. Alimony reading for our guide to towers a strong social media sponsorship program.

Bonus: Download a self-ruling employee sponsorship toolkit that shows you how to plan, launch, and grow a successful employee sponsorship program for your organization.

What is social media advocacy?

Social media sponsorship is a way to leverage the social networks of the people who like you and/or are invested in your unfurled success: your customers, employees, merchantry partners, influencers, and more.

According to Nielsen’s 2021 Trust in Advertising study, a whopping 89% of respondents trust recommendations from people they know. These recommendations are scrutinizingly twice as likely to generate action, too.

A social media sponsorship strategy turns your biggest fans into trademark advocates. A trademark well-wisher is someone who loves your trademark so much that they segregate to voluntarily promote your products or services on their own social media channels.

While influencers are paid to create sponsored content for your brand, trademark advocates are motivated by their enthusiasm for your product or service. They opt into your sponsorship program voluntarily. Savvy customers are unconfined at spotting paid influencer content, but organic endorsements still siphon serious weight.

By leveraging your company’s biggest cheerleaders, you proceeds wangle to their social networks. The trust-based consumer relationships you’ll build are worth their weight in gold.

What can trademark advocates do for you?

Social media is now a top waterworks for online trademark research, second only to search engines. Customers rely on social at every stage of the purchasing journey. A trademark advocate’s positive post can really help you stand out from the crowd.

Here are a few ways in which trademark advocates can help you build your business:

They leave positive reviews

Reviews from real users provide useful information for potential customers. In fact, reviews are the third-most important factor when shoppers are contemplating an online purchase:

chart showing reasons driving online purchases

Source: Hootsuite Digital 2022 report

Encourage your trademark advocates to leave positive reviews on your website — and make it easy for them to do so. You can plane generate a link to leave a review on Google and include it in your post-purchase emails to all customers.

Customers find a mix of positive and negative reviews increasingly trustworthy. Responding to reviews shows that your trademark is unshut to feedback. Make sure to engage with or respond to all reviews, good or bad.

They create user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is original, brand-specific content created by customers and published on social media or other channels. UGC acts as a trust signal, taking your trademark authenticity to the next level. It’s incredibly influential in the final stages of the buyer’s journey.

Brands like Starbucks leverage UGC to unravel up the spritz of traditional marketing posts in their social media streams:

Starbucks Instagram user-generated content

Source: instagram.com/Starbucks

Only four of these 12 recent posts on the Starbucks Instagram feed are trademark marketing posts. The other eight posts are user-generated content. In these examples, UGC creates a sense of FOMO that drives customers to stop in for the latest seasonal treat.

They bring in new users or customers

Seeing someone else’s success can help new customers visualize their own. That’s why success stories are invaluable when recruiting potential customers or users.

Airbnb, a giant in the short-term homestay space, builds trademark sponsorship with the Superhost Ambassador program.

Superhosts are experienced users who have completed at least 10 stays in the past year, maintain a 4.8 rating, and have a 90% response rate within 24 hours. They enjoy perks and special recognition for earning Superhost status.

Superhost Ambassadors share positive experiences to help new users see the benefits of hosting. They provide mentorship and tools to help new hosts succeed, all while earning rewards for bringing new hosts to Airbnb.

Airbnb Superhost Ambassadors

Source: airbnb.ca/askasuperhost

With the “Ask a Superhost” function, Ambassadors wilt de facto consumer service representatives. They wordplay questions from newbies and help them create successful Airbnb listings. In mart for their support, Ambassadors earn mazuma rewards and enjoy sectional features and tools.

How to set up a social media sponsorship program

The key to towers a strong social media sponsorship program lies in leveraging your existing communities. But surpassing you reach out to potential advocates, make sure you’ve got a plan in place.

Here’s how to start towers your own social media sponsorship program.

1. Start with your goals

Consider what you’re trying to unzip with your social media sponsorship program. What kinds of trademark advocates are you looking to build your polity with? What kind of ROI are you aiming for?

Use the S.M.A.R.T goal-setting program to develop a set of constructive goals. That ways setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals.

Here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T goal:

Create a trademark sponsorship program to grow my Instagram pursuit by 15 percent over the next 90 days.

Now that you’ve got an violating goal in mind, you can icon out the tactics you’ll need to follow to unzip it.

2. Identify potential trademark advocates

After setting your goals, you need to find your trademark advocates, recruit them to your cause, and grow excitement among them well-nigh your company, campaign, or initiative.

Be sure to develop your program virtually valuable opportunities and rewards for the participants. Show them how taking part in the program will goody them. Three cadre things to focus on to momentum the program, including your search for the perfect participants, are:

  • Effective communication
  • Clear program architecture
  • Professional integration

To find the weightier trademark advocates for your social media sponsorship program, you need to understand who you want to target, and ask yourself some key questions:

  • What are their pain points?
  • What incentives would be valuable to them?
  • What are their interests?
  • Who do they engage with on social media?

Deciding to develop a trademark sponsorship program doesn’t have to midpoint starting from scratch. If your trademark is zippy on social media, then there’s a good endangerment your customers and fans are as well. This polity is likely once talking well-nigh (and to) your brand.

Look at your social media followers and newsletter subscriber lists. Who’s liking your posts and clicking your newsletter links? These engaged fans are prime candidates for your sponsorship program.

3. Don’t forget well-nigh employee advocates

Employees can moreover be fantastic advocates for your trademark and business. An employee sponsorship program amplifies visitor messaging and broadens your social media reach.

When recruiting employee trademark advocates, make it well-spoken that the program is optional. Internal advocates usually see the value in incentives, but they don’t want to be bribed or coerced into participating!

Here are a few tips to incentivize your employee trademark advocates:

  • Follow employees from your visitor finance to uplift their network
  • Use the visitor finance to share creative messaging created by employees
  • Create a races where everyone who shares a piece of marketing content is entered to win a prize
  • Keep track of employees who share content unceasingly and share this information with their managers
  • Acknowledge frequent sharers in visitor meetings or newsletters

Hootsuite Amplify helps you take the guesswork out of employee social media advocacy. Amplify allows your employees to wangle pre-approved content to share on their social feeds — all queued up and ready to go.

When washed-up right, employee sponsorship is one of the most constructive ways to uplift your public image and employee engagement.

4. Reward your advocates

Once you’ve got trademark advocates, hang onto them! Make sure your social media sponsorship program includes valuable opportunities and rewards for the participants. Show them how taking part in the program will goody them.

Try the pursuit tips to get the wittiness rolling:

  • Follow users that follow you and engage with the content they share
  • Highlight polity members who contribute positively to your online discussions
  • Reward the people who stand out in your community
  • Send them swag or unbelieve codes

Best practices for a strong social media sponsorship program

Keep trademark advocates engaged

For your sponsorship program to be effective, you need to build a strong connection with your advocates. Weightier specimen scenario: you’ll have hundreds, or plane thousands, of engaged trademark advocates championing your brand. These advocates need to finger valued!

Your social media sponsorship strategy needs to be scalable. Put someone in tuition of answering well-wisher questions and keeping them on track. Consider appointing a program lead to take on the engagement task as the program grows.

Add value to the experience

You can alimony members engaged by subtracting value to their experience:

  • Create programming or education for your trademark advocates
  • Offer discounts on educational opportunities
  • Add value with sectional experiences, such as in-person meetups
  • Incentivize or plane gamify your program by running contests or fun challenges

A relationship with a good trademark well-wisher is mutually beneficial, so alimony up with your end of the bargain.

Review your sponsorship program on a regular basis

Review your trademark sponsorship program every few months to see how your progress is tracking versus the goals you established at the start. If something isn’t working, make adjustments to get things when on track. Social media is constantly evolving, and so should your sponsorship program.

Tap into the power of employee sponsorship with Hootsuite Amplify. Increase reach, alimony employees engaged, and measure results—safely and securely. Learn how Amplify can help grow your organization today.

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